Book Review: ‘Class Matters,’ by Richard D. Kahlenberg

CLASS MATTERS: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, by Richard D. Kahlenberg

If there is one lesson that centrist Democrats have taken from Donald Trump’s startlingly broad-based victory in November, it is that their party will never return to majority status unless it regains the trust of working-class Americans. Those voters — nonwhite as well as white — rejected the language of race and identity that they associate, fairly or not, with the Democrats. So it’s no surprise that the party has scrambled to develop a “credible working-class message” that will “win them back,” in the words of one super PAC that plans to invest $50 million in the effort.

Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game. His ship finally came in two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action violated the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. Kahlenberg’s new book, “Class Matters,” is his personal history of the debate, his victory lap and his spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race.

That victory lap is hard to begrudge: Kahlenberg writes that he has been laboring in the vineyards since he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard in 1984 on Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to forge a cross-racial working-class coalition in the 1968 presidential election. Kahlenberg found that Kennedy opposed even mild forms of racial preference in favor of economic programs that would benefit all working-class Americans. I was as surprised to learn this now as Kahlenberg was then, though as a biographer of Hubert Humphrey I know that the devastating loss in 1968 sent Humphrey on the same trajectory.

A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.

Just before the 1992 election, Kahlenberg notes, the Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded that the fraction of white voters who felt they had a “personal responsibility” for those injustices was “zero.” Greenberg described affirmative action as a “problem of historic proportions” — as mandatory school desegregation plans had been for an earlier generation of Democrats. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election in part by soft-pedaling race-specific policy solutions; but as president, Kahlenberg concludes, Clinton felt the need to reward civil rights groups by embracing affirmative action.

Unlike many conservatives, Kahlenberg accepts the immense salience of race in American life and thus the unfair disadvantages so many students of color face. But the ugly secret of affirmative action, the author argues, is that most Black beneficiaries are middle-class, while many of the white or Asian applicants left out in the cold are working-class students who have done well in school despite significant disadvantages of their own. Are they less deserving?